How to get a HUD in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: Valve enable custom UIs

CS:GO came out two years ago now, and wasn’t looking so shabby then. But through regular, incremental updates, it’s lately become both vibrant eSport and crate-fuelled community celebration – the beneficiary of all the lessons Valve have learned with Team Fortress and Dota 2.

The latest of those updates is like the rest: nondescript, but deeply important to somebody. Players now have the option to fiddle with the game’s HUD elements.

The on-screen Radar can now be shrunken or embiggened. The Player Count widget can be shunted to either the top of the screen or the bottom, and edited to show either the player count or all avatars.

The main parts of the HUD – namely health, ammo and money – can be recoloured to the shade of your choice, or be turned opaque by tweaking their background alpha value.

Players can choose to display the bomb’s position under the radar or in the default inventory position. And finally, the Dirty Harry minimalists of the community can turn off their bullet indicator altogether and simply count down their clip in their heads.

All of the above can be edited via the relevant CS files, which are listed on the official blog.

A more customisable CS can only be a good thing – this game is a hobby after all, and hobbyists spend a long time looking at that HUD. But players are also reporting that Valve have inadvertently introduced a framerate bug in the past week. Have any of you lot encountered that?